


Overclocked

by forthegreatergood



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, Hand Jobs, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oral Sex, Scarecrow's Fear Toxin (DCU), catastrophic ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 05:02:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18308720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: There were worse things in the world than spending three days working through the lingering effects of Scarecrow’s latest rampage, Hal was sure.  For instance, having to ask Bruce for help.  Also on the list? Having to deal with his feelings.Hal looked at the contraption in his hand.  It reminded him of nothing so much as an epi-pen, which he also had no idea how to use. “So you just… have this.  On hand.  Ready to go.”“One doesn’t earn the coveted title of Mr. Contingency Plan by being unprepared,” Bruce told him, and Hal winced.  He hadn’t meant for Bruce to overhear that, had he?  Then again, he’d said it loud enough that any Martians left kicking it in their ruins had probably heard him, over Barry’s strenuous and utterly futile attempts to get him to pipe down, so he hadn’t exactly not meant for Bruce to hear it, either. “Instructions are on the package, and there’s a bathroom just down the hall to your left if you’d prefer to administer it in private.”If Hal wanted someplace to get his shit together for a few seconds, Bruce meant.





	Overclocked

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of DC and their respective parent companies.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Hal flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders, and took a deep breath. The elevator in front of him was sleek, shiny, opulent, and slower than a fucking freight elevator. Maybe speed wasn’t an issue when the building’s occupants were all super-rich and had nowhere to be where everyone wouldn’t happily wait for them. Maybe it was more important that they not spill anything or be jostled in the slightest than that they not spend fifteen minutes just trying to get to their multi-million-dollar suites. Maybe it was just his fried nerves finally giving way. Hal caught a glimpse of himself in the polished metal surface of the doors and stepped back.

He looked exactly like a guy who hadn’t slept in three days and was here to yell at somebody about it. Hal rubbed his face and tried to smooth down his hair. He could just… think calm thoughts, couldn’t he? Try to fake some zen about all this? There was pretty much no way this conversation was going to go well, but walking into it looking like he was trying to pick a fight and radiating nervous energy would push it into objective-disaster territory. And really, he’d had more than enough of those in the past week to last him a fucking lifetime.

It wasn’t even like he had anyone to blame but himself. Sure, Clark was the one who’d talked him into playing back-up in Gotham while Clark was off investigating the wreckage of a Kryptonian scientific expedition, and sure, Barry was the one who’d thrown Hal’s name into the hat as a replacement in the first place. But it had been Hal who’d somehow assumed the shit everyone talked about Gotham was hyperbole. 

It was hard not to rag on Bruce about his… well, everything. The perpetual scowl, the skulking in shadows, the way people were surprised to find out he _wasn’t_ a vampire. The way Bruce seemed to have a life-threatening allergy to fun.

The elevator chimed and--finally--slid open, and Hal stared at the plush carpeting lining its floor. He’d been in general’s offices where the carpeting wasn’t this nice. The whole building screamed that it wasn’t for someone like him, that he’d made a mistake coming here. Walking into the elevator felt like walking into a trap, which was dumb, because he’d already done that, hadn’t he? Walked right into it without even thinking twice. Hal made himself start moving again, walked into the elevator, and hit the button for the penthouse.

The problem, he thought, was that even the most cursory browse through the headlines in any Gotham-area newsfeed was enough to inform the casual observer that it was a weird place. And it really wasn’t Hal’s fault that there was something inherently hilarious about the idea of dour, monochromatic, too-cool-for-school Bruce Wayne winding up in yet another brawl with a clown-college drop-out and his store-brand juggalos. It also wasn’t like Barry and Oliver didn’t have their own problems with gangs who took their color-coordination to new and alarming levels, except they managed to handle things without spending the other half the of night brooding on the skyline like a flesh-and-blood architectural feature.

Gotham being weird and Bruce being too intense for his own good were low-hanging fruit, and it was only natural that people would exaggerate them for comedic effect whenever Bruce needed someone knocking him back down a peg or two, which was pretty much always.

Probably, Hal thought sourly, because Bruce spent too much time in places like this, which had been designed, built, and sold to make people in Bruce’s socioeconomic stratum feel like the center of the universe. It was a lie that had an ugly way of making itself true. Or maybe it was the time Bruce spent throwing down with the other side of Gotham, where the introspective and reflective got self-sorted into early graves because they hadn’t been fast enough, hadn’t been hard enough, had hesitated at the wrong moment with someone who didn’t. 

The kicker was that if Hal had even once bothered looking up actual news footage or mugshots or casefiles, he wouldn’t have been caught flat. It stung, that lack of preparation and planning that Bruce was always riding him about coming back on him like this. It wasn’t usually a fair accusation; Hal had good strategic instincts, and he’d gotten better results keeping his methods fluid and adapting on the fly as the situation changed than he ever had with Bruce’s type of rigid, intricate planning. Things where one little variable being off meant the whole plan came toppling down simply didn’t work for him. This time, though, he hadn’t done enough recon to know what he didn’t know, and it hadn’t even occurred to him that he was flying blind.

It was one thing to listen to Clark gently ribbing Bruce about getting into a sword fight with a guy wearing a full tux in the middle of an aquarium. It was another thing to see the snarling, hissing _squawking_ jagoff in action, far faster and more nimble than Hal would have expected given the man’s shape and stature. Hal was no stranger to the bizarre--he’d seen more in his first hour on Oa than most humans could even dream of seeing in a lifetime--but there was something deeply, paralyzingly wrong about the warped monstrosities Gotham produced. It was like seeing humanity in a funhouse mirror and realizing the reflection was both real and gunning for you, personally.

“Uh, duh? Why do you think everyone else avoids that place like the fucking plague?” Oliver had asked, when Hal had tried talking about it afterwards. “Even the normal criminals like the mobsters are still so much weirder than they should be. Like, the guys that are in it for the money and the respect and maybe the undiagnosed depressive disorder where they can make it through the week if they know they’re never gonna make it to retirement, and ordinarily you see zero supervillains coming out of that bracket?”

Hal had known then that the conversation was going to end with him having a migraine. 

“In a regular city the mobsters have those, what, maybe one or two guys where nobody wants to work with them because they’re a little too into it? Those one or two guys are Gotham’s baseline. And then they’re sitting down _their_ version of That Guy going, ‘You can’t put on a mask and only do murders on alternate Tuesdays, it’s embarrassing the family.’ I mean, we’re talking about a city council that refuses to call anyone who’s not a meta a supervillain because otherwise the stats would have the feds bulldozing everything and declaring it the new Area 51 and everybody knows it. There was an honest-to-god argument between the DA’s office and the mayor’s office about whether or not Mr. Freeze had to be counted, since he’s physiologically altered, but not in a way that gives him powers. It’s like… you ever play _Silent Hill_?”

“ _Silent Hill_ isn’t real.” And there it was, that awful throbbing starting up at the base of Hal’s skull. A horror game in which a person’s worst fears and unresolved traumas came to life and tried to kill them really wasn’t what he’d wanted to discuss, when he’d dropped in on Oliver for some perspective.

“Well, I’m pretty sure the working title was ‘Gotham,’ but then the tourism board threatened to sue them,” Oliver continued, shrugging that patented Oliver shrug that said he hadn’t survived three years shipwrecked on a desert island fighting narco-terrorists with weapons from the paleolithic just to give a shit about this.

What it said about the situation that Hal hadn’t known if Oliver was joking about either the game or Gotham having a tourism board, Hal was sure he didn’t know.

“Superman doesn’t seem to mind it,” Hal pointed out. Not that Clark exactly had delicate sensibilities, but he was a soft touch. He hated seeing people suffer needlessly, hated it when guys like Luthor tried to smash the world just to see how the pieces would look scattered all over the floor. Hal had a hard time imagining Clark dealing well with someone like Ventriloquist, never mind taking Bruce’s patrol circuit once or twice a month just to be neighborly.

“I think it’s less that Superman doesn’t mind it--because he very much definitely does mind it, a lot--so much as it’s worth suffering through a few hours of Gotham every so often to remind everyone in Metropolis that, if they don’t shape up, they could have the goddamn Batman slithering out of an air vent or kicking in the skylight or popping up in their backseat as soon as they hit cruising speed on the highway,” Oliver said. “He fits in, in Gotham. You forget how utterly terrifying he can be. Then you drop him in the middle of someplace that’s not Crazytown, USA, and suddenly, hey, playtime’s over and everybody gets religion about not selling alien-derived weapons systems to underage gang members.”

That had given Hal pause, hadn’t it? The idea of Bruce actually being terrifying was a new one. Bruce could be a lot of things--annoying, self-righteous, unforgiving, humorless, _human_ \--but frightening had never been one of them. 

Even when Bruce had been casually taking Hal’s ring away and neatly side-stepping all of Hal’s standard containment methods, it hadn’t pinged on Hal’s radar. Everyone else who’d busted through his defenses like that had gloated over it, wanted him to feel powerless, wanted him to know what they could do to him, if they felt like it. They’d wanted to scare him. Bruce had just wanted him to shape the fuck up. Bruce had made it look so damn easy and given him so much shit about it that it hadn’t come across as a genuine threat.

“That’s because you’ve never had him pointed at you,” Oliver informed him, when he’d said as much. “I get that you two irritate the hell out of each other, but that isn’t really the same thing as him seeing you as an enemy to take down.”

“And this is an experience you’ve had?” Not that Bruce seemed to be in any more of a hurry to team up with Oliver than he was to partner with Hal, but the two of them had managed a certain cordiality that Hal and Bruce had never bothered with. Or at least, Hal thought they had.

Oliver spread his hands and grimaced. “I was in disguise, mistakes were made. It was like getting up for a glass of water at three in the morning, opening the door, and finding yourself face to face with a fucking grizzly bear. I damn near pissed myself. And not that you _would_ tell him that, but if you tell him that, I swear to god they will never find your body.”

It had made it slightly easier for Hal to argue with himself, to tell himself he was being ridiculous. Bruce wasn’t a meta, no. Bruce didn’t have powers, didn’t have a ring or an artifact or experimental implants powering him. Bruce was, yes, basically just a guy in a bat costume. But Bruce was also tough, and smart, and had been doing this for a troublingly long time. 

Bruce’s response to a dude who looked like a scarecrow prop rejected by Children of the Corn for being too creepy and was waving around a fucking spring-loaded scythe had been to punch him in the face, cuff him to a flagpole, and then swarm up a flimsy rope ladder to seize control of the guy’s unanchored dirigible full of designer bio-weapons. It had all taken Bruce maybe thirty seconds, from the time he’d located Crane to when he’d disappeared into Crane’s rudderless, drifting ship. 

It had been like watching an Olympic gymnast hitting their marks, perfect and coordinated, every change in trajectory calculated to minimize loss of momentum. If anything about it had fazed Bruce, he hadn’t let it show.

Hal, on the other hand, had been too busy trying to process the idea that humans came in flavors that fucked up to notice the roiling mass of vines winding their way across the roof. He wasn’t sure, now, whether or not Crane had been giving it his best shot as a distraction, only that for some reason Hal had never expected to feel that level of palpable evil rolling off a terrestrial threat. That hackle-raising, visceral horror was one thing when an all-devouring cosmic maw like Parallax was involved. It was quite another to feel it when he was facing off against someone who was, for all intents and purposes, just some fucking guy. But whether it had been intentional or not, Hal had been distracted, and he hadn’t seen the vines until it was too late.

Which was another thing Hal only had himself to blame for, because he hadn’t really been listening when Bruce had run through the situation, had he? It had been like some sort of bad joke. A botanist and a psychiatrist walk into a bar--you’d have thought one of them would have seen it and ducked. 

Hal had the ring. Hal was the Green Lantern. Hal dealt with threats to the galaxy. What was it he’d said? “I got this.”

Hal wondered if Bruce had believed him, if that was why Bruce hadn’t bothered babysitting him the same way he tended to keep an eye on Oliver. Probably not. If he’d gone to Bruce and said, “I fully intend on fucking this up five ways from Sunday,” Bruce would still have run the numbers twice before agreeing that it was a likely outcome. Hal blithely underestimating the nature and scale of the threat before breezing off to handle his part of it had almost certainly left Bruce with no doubts about how it was going to go. It was just that Bruce had likely calculated Hal’s odds of being able to get himself back out of whatever trouble he got himself into as fairly good and then focused on his own half of the plan.

Some doctor in a shitty costume and a chick who could control plants--that’s what Hal had been convinced he’d be handling for Bruce. Not even _with_ Bruce, not really. He’d thought…

Hal caught his hands curling into fists again and forced himself to loosen up. Sixty floors in the world’s slowest goddamned elevator--he’d be lucky if he hadn’t grown a five o’clock shadow for good measure by the time he had to look Bruce in the eye. An image rose unbidden at that--sharp, cold blue staring out at him from the center of an ugly, raised bruise. Hal rubbed his chin and jerked himself away from that line of thought.

Fucking it up five ways from Sunday would have been an improvement.

Isley and Crane had been working together, and while Bruce had fully expected them to turn on each other in the event that they achieved their goal or realized they’d been thwarted, he’d been perfectly clear on the necessity of dealing with them as a team until that point. “They’re both goal-oriented and highly focused. They’ll present a united front so long as there’s a credible external threat to deal with or some hope of victory.”

Somehow Hal had assumed the guy with the razor-sharp hell-blade and the toxic gas would be a bigger problem than the plant lady, assured himself that the ring could take care of both scythe and gas handily, and neglected to recall that plants were, of their own accord and with no help from a meta, already deeply horrifying things under the right circumstances. The only defense Hal could really muster there was that, outside of Robinson Park, he’d never actually seen more than a few stray weeds anywhere in the city. It hadn’t occurred to him that Poison Ivy was capable of scattering a few pounds of seed around and turning the top two floors of an office building into some sort of demented rooftop doom-garden in thirty minutes flat, and so Hal had focused on Crane and forgotten about Isley.

And then he’d had poisoned thorns punching through his suit and delivering their payload right into his bloodstream. Self-directed, shockingly fast-moving tendrils wrapped around him, engulfing him, hemming him in, and somehow fighting had only made everything worse. He’d had maybe a handful of seconds to come up with a coherent plan before the toxin hit and rendered it a moot point, and he’d been too rattled to make the deadline. He couldn’t quite remember, once he’d sweated the last of the toxin out of his system, whether the poison had rendered him incapable of using the ring at all or simply incapable of using the ring effectively.

Either way, Bruce had to circle back and cut him free with the scythe, which was precisely the sort of peeled-out overdrive irony it turned out that Gotham specialized in. Bruce had to leave Isley in the wind, free to wreak whatever havoc she had left on her agenda. Bruce had to cart Hal’s shivering, convulsing, hallucinating ass back to the cave for treatment.

It hadn’t been his finest hour, and Bruce hadn’t been what anyone could call gracious about it. Not that he’d gone out of his way to be a bigger ass than usual, from what Hal could recall, but it was Bruce. His bedside manner sucked on a good day, with people he had a good rapport with. When it came to guys he’d only grudgingly agreed to work with because of the--it turned out, completely reasonable--expectation that they’d screw up the second his back was turned, it somehow found a way to suck even harder.

Hal’d had ample time to wonder, in the past few days, what he would have spent those five hours having waking nightmares about if Bruce had simply shot him up with the antidote and headed back out to try bringing Isley in. Would the silence have made it worse? Would he have thought that he was back in medical isolation on Oa, this time with nothing to break the monotony and keep him from succumbing to cabin fever? Trapped in that week he’d spent drifting in and out of consciousness in an ICU while military doctors tried to knock out the meningitis doing its best to kill him?

Hal didn’t have any reason to think it would’ve been better, except that he couldn’t imagine it actually having been worse. Anything would’ve been better than his subconscious taking the effects of the poison and the details of his surroundings and the localized electrical storm happening in his amygdala and spitting out the slow-motion nightmare he’d had playing on repeat not just for that interminable stretch of time but every night since. Dreams about dying alone in space, or dying alone in a negative-pressure hospital room with everyone he loved on the other side of the glass, would at least have been something he could’ve dealt with on his own.

Hal watched the floors tick by and realized his hand was curled into a fist again. What was he even doing here? What the fuck did he think this was going to change? He’d have been better off running down one of the League’s medical contacts. It was just some residue lingering in his system like antibodies from an allergic reaction. It would pass, if he gave it a chance, if he stopped scratching it raw every time his attention lapsed. The little speech he’d scripted when he’d decided to come here had sounded fine, in his head. Now that he was maybe a few minutes away from saying it to Bruce’s face... 

It was stupid. He was being stupid.

Hal took a deep breath. It wasn’t too late to bail out. Bruce didn’t expect him, wouldn’t think he’d just dodged a bullet when Hal failed to show up on his doorstep. It wasn’t too late to turn tail and run.

Hal clenched his jaw. Except it was just as easily this that was turning tail and running, this inability to ride out the last of the poison’s symptoms without slinking back for reassurance. The whole thing had been a hallucination. Bruce had explained that much, gone through point by point and told him that no, none of that had happened. None of it had been real. Hal had been too wrung out, too blitzed to realize what it was he was asking. He’d had an excuse, once he’d finally come down, for freaking out. Three fucking days later, and what did he have? Some dumbass plan about running to Bruce for comfort because he kept having bad dreams.

Bruce was going to laugh at him and tell him to get the fuck out of his building. Not that it said Wayne on the side of it, not that Bruce would have seen fit to advertise like that, not in Star City. It was neutral territory, just an investment, Hal was sure. But Bruce was the sort of control freak who would buy the whole damn building, wouldn’t he? Buy it, beef up the security systems, have a little less to pick at when he breezed into town a few times a year.

Bruce was going to laugh at him and tell him to get the fuck out of his building, because things were fine. Hal’s nightmares weren’t Bruce’s problem. It was just an after-effect, just something Hal had to ride out. Nothing had happened. It had been fine. It had been a bad trip.

Hal closed his eyes and focused on breathing. It felt like he had something in his throat, something he couldn’t swallow around. Three floors left, and that window to call the whole thing off was closing, because Bruce would definitely fucking notice if Hal made it to his front door and then turned around and bolted. Nothing had happened. He hadn’t been able to focus, with a full dose of that toxin slopping around in his blood, playing merry hell with his endocrine system. He hadn’t been able to focus, which meant he hadn’t been able to use the ring, which meant it had been nothing more than his own brain, hijacked and turned against him by some psycho with a fear fetish and his eco-warrior gal-pal.

The dumbest fucking part of the whole dumb fucking mess was that this wasn’t even something Hal was actually afraid of. 

He didn’t really like Bruce, could give a shit if Bruce got his ass kicked so long as Hal didn’t have to watch it. If Hal worried about anyone, it was Oliver, with his bow and his arrows and his case of survivor’s guilt he’d never, ever admit to, or maybe Arthur, with the murderous politics of his undersea kingdom and his increasing sense of alienation from his adopted homeland, or conceivably even Barry, with the powers that occasionally left him steamrolled and starving and that huge, soft heart of his. 

Hal would probably even worry about Clark before he worried about Bruce, given that a few ounces of kryptonite was all it took to knock Clark flat, and it seemed like everyone and their brother was packing it these days. Bruce wasn’t the sort of guy who got caught by surprise, and certainly not by someone like Hal--he’d proven that a half-dozen times within the first hour of Hal meeting him.

And Hal’s control of the ring’s power was, even in Sinestro’s grudging estimation, flawless. He didn’t slip, he didn’t crack, and he didn’t fuck up. Not when it came to the ring. He’d never have been allowed to keep it if he did, would’ve gotten the Oan equivalent of doused in whiskey and dropped off outside a bus station to rant about aliens and magic weapons and green lights in the sky. As it was, as hard as the Guardians had looked for an excuse not to accept someone from a pre-interstellar civilization into the fold, they hadn’t found one with him.

So the absolute last thing Hal had ever worried about was getting so hopped up on fear gas that he freaked out, tried to protect Bruce from some random hallucinated threat, lost control of his powers, and…

Hal leaned forward, braced his hands on the elevator’s cold metal walls, and listened to his heart race.

Bruce was going to laugh at him and tell him to get the fuck out of his building, because the Bruce that kept dying in a mass of uncontrollable, metastasizing green light in Hal’s sweat-soaked, screaming nightmares was a figment of his fucking imagination.

The elevator chimed, and Hal pushed himself back upright. There were clammy handprints on the metal, the pristine fixture smudged from him touching it. It felt like some kind of on-the-nose metaphor, the sort of thing Bruce would narrow his eyes at and then not say anything about because he knew Hal could _feel_ him not saying it. Hal had barged in where he wasn’t needed, wanted, or useful, made a giant mess, and then needed the person cleaning up after him to tell him that no, really, it was okay. It was practically the story of his fucking life.

The doors slid open, and Hal swallowed. One foot in front of the other; it was too late to turn back now. He could either do this, or he could spend the next week waiting for Bruce to ask what the hell he’d been doing at the least opportune time to have the conversation. He could either do this, or he could spend the next fuck knew how long seeing Bruce broken and dying every time he fell asleep. Just one short hallway, and then maybe things would get back to how they were supposed to be.

Hal wondered if the white carpet, the white walls, and the red paintings hung on them had been specifically chosen for the unsettling effect they produced, or if it was some chic aesthetic thing spit out by a professional designer and beneath Bruce’s notice. Or maybe it was just the hallway leading to a single door, the psychological effect of there being nowhere to go but forward or back. Hal steeled himself and raised his hand to knock on the door, then found it swinging open, because of course Bruce would make it obvious he knew Hal was there, knew Hal was coming, had a perfect and total awareness of his environment at all times.

It was the exact type of low-grade, pointless dick-swinging that could let Hal pretend everything was okay, scrounge up the minimum level of irritation with Bruce’s bullshit to get his game-face on. With Bruce leaning on the jamb, hand firm on the door like he reserved the right to slam it in Hal’s face, it was easy to remember how obnoxious Bruce could be and a little harder to remember that rotten, gut-twisting fear that kept bubbling up whenever Hal’s brain slipped the leash. Which was why he was here, wasn’t it? Flesh-and-blood Bruce was fine, and this would hopefully be enough to convince whatever neurons he had left of that, and then he could get the fuck on with his life.

“Did you need something?” Bruce asked. There was no trace of that customary combative boredom Hal was used to having directed at him when he interrupted Bruce’s brooding, which was something. There was maybe a grain or two of concern, which was something else.

Hal’s fingers curled around his elbows, and he bit his lip. He’d had a fucking speech prepared, hadn’t he? He’d decided what he wanted to say, and now his exhausted, overheated frontal lobe was stuck on the emergency broadcast signal. Maybe he should have written it down.

Bruce cocked his head, eyes narrowing, and Hal couldn’t help looking at the shiner Bruce had come away from that fight with. 

Hal’s gaze traced the odd, irregular shape of it… twice? three times? before his brain caught up with the rest of his nervous system, which was already reacting like he’d just gotten kicked in the balls. The bruise on Bruce’s face wasn’t odd or irregular so much as it was a debossed version of the ring on Hal’s finger. The ring, which had left that imprint when Hal had, at some point that night, caught Bruce with a hard right cross. At some point after Bruce had called it on account of Hal needing medical treatment, because Bruce definitely hadn’t been wearing the cowl when Hal’s fist had smashed into his fucking face.

“Do you think I could come in, please?” Hal asked. His voice sounded like he’d been gargling rocks, and somehow it was barely a request, which Hal supposed made a certain amount of sense, because he wasn’t sure he could make himself turn around and walk away.

Bruce relented after a long, scrambling moment in which Hal tried to reconcile not walking away with Bruce telling him to fuck off, tried to find some way through it that didn’t involve wading right into the precise thing he’d been choking on for the last three days. Hal brushed past him, too close for comfort with that mottled green and purple blossoming across Bruce’s skin. Not that it ever wasn’t too close for comfort, with Bruce.

Bruce shut the door and watched him, observing silently as Hal took the lay of the land.

Which it wasn’t like Bruce had room to disapprove, there. It was occasionally like watching a goddamn terminator run a murderbot scan, when Bruce walked into unfamiliar territory and couldn’t be bothered to keep it subtle. Hal was just making sure that they were alone, that they were something approaching secure. Plus there was something vaguely fascinating about the combination of bright white and primary colors that the interior decorators had run with, like someone had picked up on the fact that Bruce Wayne was secretly Batman and decided to screw with him by making everything too bright and antiseptic. It was the polar opposite of the caves and back alleys Bruce spent most of his real life in.

“Did you forget that you could afford actual artwork?” Hal demanded, waving a hand at the solid blocks of color in a gilt frame hanging above the dining table.

“It’s an exceptionally faithful Rothko forgery,” Bruce told him. “Why are you here?”

“You… deliberately bought a fake?” Hal asked. Bruce wouldn’t have brought evidence from one of Batman’s cases home, not as paranoid as he was about security. He looked more closely at the piece. People didn’t forge random paintings. “This is an actual _thing_?”

“I’m not going to hang a real Rothko in an apartment I only spend a few weeks a year in any more than I’m going to debate abstract expressionism’s place in art history with you. Though yes, the previous owner was up-front about having been taken in by a forger.”

Hal closed his eyes and took a breath. Bruce was fine, and saying shit like that to him, and that was the end of it, wasn’t it? That should have been the end of it, if there’d been any justice in the world. But somehow his brain was refusing to get with the program, and somehow the muddy green and vibrant red of the painting in front of him was a pulsing, shifting reminder of what an improperly controlled green-light construct could do to a human body. How long did it take without real sleep before a person was just seeing shit on their own, no toxins or drugs necessary?

“Hal.”

“I wanted to apologize for decking you,” Hal blurted.

“You came all the way to Star City and essentially broke into a property I own through three layers of shell companies precisely in order to avoid a situation like this so that you could apologize for something you had no idea you’d done until I opened the door?” Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow. He leaned back against the wall and let Hal squirm for another few seconds. “I suppose you might as well get it over with, then.”

“I didn’t _break in_ ,” Hal said, nettled. How long had he spent gaping at that fucking bruise, giving Bruce a front-row seat to his dawning comprehension that the black eye wasn’t something Bruce had picked up trying to get Crane’s blimp under control? Long enough, that was for damn sure.

“Deliberately circumvented a significant number of security measures, then,” Bruce amended.

“And I just tracked your comm, I didn’t spend the past month cyberstalking you or something.” It occurred to Hal, as Bruce’s other eyebrow joined the first halfway to his hairline, that using alien technology to trace something Bruce already resented carrying wasn’t the most strategically sound admission he could have made.

“I do have plans for the rest of the evening, Jordan,” Bruce said.

“A minute ago, it was Hal.” It came out snippier than he’d meant it, but Bruce made it a hell of a lot easier to argue with him than to show weakness around him.

Bruce shrugged, a smooth, minute rise and fall of his shoulders that communicated precisely how bothered he was by Hal’s pique. “A minute ago, you weren’t lying to me.”

Hal rubbed the back of his neck. Now, after he’d pissed Bruce off past the point of any of it being useful, was when he finally remembered the speech he’d composed earlier. Of fucking course.

“I’ve been having nightmares since Isley’s plants got the drop on me. I thought maybe swinging by and verifying the fact that you’re alive and in one piece and still a jackass would break the cycle or something.”

Bruce nodded, like that was exactly what he’d expected Hal to say.

“Is this a known side effect you just didn’t bother to mention?” Hal asked. “Because, seriously? Dick move.”

“Isley’s never incorporated something like Crane’s fear toxin into her poisons before,” Bruce told him. “In its original aerosol formulation, the fear toxin’s effects aren’t persistent after treatment. There’s no such thing as known side effects in your case, which is why I asked you to report any lingering or unusual issues immediately instead of trying to work through it like a hangover.”

“You, uh, did?” Hal had no memory whatsoever of that.

“By text, that morning. It seemed more reliable than issuing the instructions verbally, at the time.”

“Yeah.” Hal shifted his weight uneasily. “My phone’s, uh, at the bottom of Metropolis Bay. Turns out I really wasn’t in any shape to be flying myself home.”

Bruce had even said he could sleep it off in a spare bedroom, for all that it had looked physically painful to make the offer, but the only thing Hal had wanted was the fuck out of Dodge. Bruce didn’t bother with the _I told you so_ now, for which Hal was grudgingly grateful.

“You are, however, exhibiting symptoms consistent with low-level exposure to fear toxin,” Bruce said, answering the question Hal hadn’t quite asked. “So you continuing to experience side effects of the same is not a particularly shocking revelation.”

“So this idea I had that proving to my brain that you’re fine isn’t going to work,” Hal grunted. He didn’t need Bruce to confirm it, at this point; Hal could already feel the goal posts moving on him. Bruce was standing there, completely fine, but what if he wasn’t? What if that soft button-down was hiding taped ribs and surgical staples? Hal had damn near split his knuckles on Bruce’s cheekbone, from the depth and size of that bruise, and Hal didn’t even remember hitting him. What else didn’t he remember?

“I wouldn’t expect it to be terribly effective, no. Though…” Hal tried not to flinch at the coolly assessing look Bruce gave him. It was hard not to bristle when Bruce looked at him too long, even under normal circumstances. It was hard not to feel like he was being challenged to a fight with no right moves to make. “You do seem to be marginally less of a mess than you were when you first got here.”

“Gee, thanks.” Hal glared at him, but Bruce was already turning away and heading into another room. Hal bit his lip at the immediate, half-panicked impulse not to let Bruce out of his sight, then gave up and followed him. He’d spent the last three days fighting with his nervous system, and he was fucking tired. It could have what it wanted for the next fifteen minutes.

Bruce glanced up from what he was doing, mildly surprised that Hal had tagged along. Which Hal supposed wasn’t completely unfair; any other time he’d probably have parked himself on one of the expensive white sofas and put his boots up on the expensive white coffee table the second Bruce wasn’t looking. Bruce didn’t ask, though, and Hal supposed he didn’t need to. Bruce opened a suitcase, twisted a latch, and then popped out a false bottom. His fingers grazed a handful of plastic tubes before he settled on the one he was looking for, pulled it out of its housing, and tossed it to Hal.

“Ordinarily I would run a few samples before giving you antitoxin, but taking you back to Gotham seems inadvisable at the moment and Mid-Nite’s unavailable until tomorrow afternoon, which leaves Terrific, who would look at me like I’m an idiot and give you the antitoxin without needing ‘endless reams of superfluous data.’”

Hal looked at the contraption in his hand. It reminded him of nothing so much as an epi-pen, which he also had no idea how to use. “So you just… have this. On hand. Ready to go.”

“One doesn’t earn the coveted title of Mr. Contingency Plan by being unprepared,” Bruce told him, and Hal winced. He hadn’t meant for Bruce to overhear that, had he? Then again, he’d said it loud enough that any Martians left kicking it in their ruins had probably heard him, over Barry’s strenuous and utterly futile attempts to get him to pipe down, so he hadn’t exactly not meant for Bruce to hear it, either. “Instructions are on the package, and there’s a bathroom just down the hall to your left if you’d prefer to administer it in private.”

If Hal wanted someplace to get his shit together for a few seconds, Bruce meant.

“We’re not dropping in on Mr. Terrific, then?” Hal asked.

Bruce stared at him for a moment. “Given that I know how he’ll react and what he’ll say, there doesn’t seem to be much point to pulling him out of a work function to hear him say it. So, no.”

“It’s not going to fuck me up, if you’re wrong?” Hal hedged. It would be just like Bruce to have a tranq dart in his carry-on for just such an occasion, wouldn’t it? Hal would wake up the next morning on Bruce’s bathroom floor in a puddle of his own drool, with Bruce having ditched his League communicator and gotten a twelve-hour head-start. Clark would want to know what the hell had happened and point out that he’d only been gone a week, and Hal would have to explain everything from start to finish, and then Hal would get the disappointed look most people had to rob a corner store to earn.

“If I’m wrong about what?” Bruce asked. “Your sudden and debilitating concern for my well-being indicating an effective dose of fear toxin still in your system? If you have an alternate explanation, I’m certainly willing to entertain it.”

Hal clenched his fists, the plastic edges digging into the palm of his right hand, and set his jaw. “Have you ever, even once in your entire fucking life, for a single second, considered being less of a flaming asshole about things?”

Bruce kneaded his temples, and Hal couldn’t help but notice the way Bruce’s fingertips navigated around that bruise. How tired Bruce looked with his guard down. How easily things could have gone a whole hell of a lot worse, with Crane and Isley.

“You came here because you’re having a problem,” Bruce pointed out, letting his hands drop. “You now have a solution, to the problem you’re having. I’m not sure what part of this justifies name-calling.”

“The part where you act like I’m swanning around giving zero shits about your well-being,” Hal said. They were, for better or worse, on the same side of things. He’d meant to have Bruce’s back. Just because Bruce was one of the most infuriating people Hal had ever met didn’t mean Hal could spend three days dreaming about being responsible for Bruce’s violent death without feeling it. “The part where my hindbrain screaming at me that you’re hurt and I need to do something about it is just peachy because I don’t give a fuck if you’re--”

Hal broke off and took a slow, deep breath. Maybe his nervous system getting its own way wasn’t the best method of handling this.

“Hal, look at me,” Bruce said, and his tone was at least gentle. Hal pulled himself together enough to listen, and Bruce’s expression wasn’t that far off from kind, too. It might have moved the needle, if it weren’t for the unmistakable and painful-looking black eye. “Of the two of us, I’m not the one you need to be concerned about right now.”

“And yet,” Hal muttered.

Bruce spread his arms and looked down at himself. “I’m fine. I know how difficult it is to deal with the toxin’s effects, but take another dose of the antidote and please keep in mind that it’s a poison, and it’s lying to you.”

Hal flexed his hand around the plastic sleeve. Bruce made it sound so easy--just get a stranglehold on his own endocrine system and shake it until it came to its senses. The only thing he could say for himself was that in actual emergency situations, he’d been able to handle himself just fine. It was only when it came to this specific situation that he had visions of sharp-edged green constructs cutting into skin, too much pressure dislocating limbs, the power spilling out of his control instead of shorting out because he couldn’t focus enough to successfully interface with the ring. Hal was pretty sure there was no faking it til you made it with homebrew poison and mutant plants whose only purpose was to induce panic attacks.

“You’re fine, except you just…” Hal licked his lips. “You’ve been not-fine a lot, and the odds of you seeing fit to inform anyone of it are real fucking low, Bruce.” Especially when they both knew Clark wasn’t around to do a quick, pointed x-ray scan and ask one of his quick, pointed questions about whether or not Bruce was sure he was okay. “Case in point, were you planning on letting me know that I’d damn near busted your eye socket?”

“You got lucky while you were incoherent and seeing things,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “So no, I wasn’t planning on calling you to account over something minor and involuntary.”

Hal’s lips twisted. _Lucky_ , like this was something he wanted. At least with Bruce here and talking and the ring demonstrably not malfunctioning, Hal’s brain had shut the fuck up about Hal being responsible for Bruce being fatally injured.

“You know what I’m saying,” he said. “You could be sporting fifteen different stab wounds under that shirt, and you’d never let on, and don’t bother trying to deny it because I’m pretty sure you’ve fucking done it.”

Bruce tilted his head and looked at Hal, and Hal had a brief flash of something fragmented and warm, Bruce’s arms around him, Bruce’s hand on the back of his head, Bruce holding him and telling him that things were fine, that he knew Hal was feeling it, but that things would be okay. Had that happened? Had Bruce actually acted like a human being in response to Hal being half out of his mind on Gotham’s shittiest new club-drug? Hal looked away. That was probably when Hal had punched him, if he had. That proximity, it would have been one of the few times Bruce wouldn’t have been able to block it easily.

When Hal looked back, Bruce was calmly unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt. Hal blinked, then watched, mesmerized, as Bruce’s hands moved to the buttons at his throat, then over his sternum, then following the line down to his belly. Bruce shrugged out of his shirt and tossed it onto the bed, then spread his hands.

“I’m perfectly fine,” Bruce told him, his voice calm and reasonable and reassuring, because of course he wasn’t going to do Hal the courtesy of giving him an opening to start the argument back up. Hal glanced at the framed mirror on the wall, checking the sliver of Bruce’s back that he could see in it. Bruce showed people what he wanted to show them and let them assume the rest, it was hardly--

Bruce sighed and did a slow turn, letting Hal get a good look at the rest of him, and then crossed his arms, neatly covering the thin pink line of the most recent scar, over his ribs. Had that one been there a few months ago? Hal couldn’t remember. 

Bruce genuinely didn’t seem to give a damn if anyone saw him naked in the locker room, but if there was anyone Hal would rather catch himself in the eyes with aftershave than get caught staring at in the buff, it was Bruce. And he would very, very definitely get caught, if he did it, because it was Bruce. It didn’t help that every so often Hal wound up catching a glimpse of something that reminded him that Bruce was the sort of pretty that people liked trying to break, and Hal usually had way better things to spend the rest of his day being pointlessly upset about than Bruce.

“Where’d you get the new one?” Hal asked. At least this time Bruce wasn’t wearing a roadmap of his latest hard wins, his skin littered with bruises that would have been broken bones and internal bleeding without the armor keeping the worst of it off his body.

“The new one?” Bruce echoed, his brows furrowing.

“Yeah, the one right--” Hal broke off and ventured out of the doorway, crossing to Bruce and poking the tail end of the diagonal slash. “Here.”

It occurred to Hal too goddamn late that touching Bruce had probably not been his best move, because Bruce might not care who saw him with no clothes on, but he sure as hell didn’t let people put their hands on him without a damn good reason. Bruce didn’t shove his hand away, though, and there was something intensely comforting about the firmness and warmth of Bruce’s skin against Hal’s fingertips.

“Attempted yacht hijacking,” Bruce said.

“You… saved somebody’s yacht?” Hal asked. “Isn’t that more Arthur’s deal?”

“No, I was aboard a yacht, and there was an attempt to hijack it. I was just an innocent bystander for that one.” Bruce adjusted his stance, and just like that there was an extra few inches between them, which ordinarily Hal would have found more comfortable but right now just made him want to grab at Bruce and not let go, because Bruce had caught that one without even putting on the suit. “Now, will you please take a follow-up dose of antitoxin and, possibly, a nap?”

“So you can go out and rack up another one?” Hal asked sourly. “On Oliver’s turf, behind Oliver’s back, so I guess add an arrow or two someplace sensitive to that tally once he finds out?”

“My plans for the evening are social, and at Oliver’s extremely insistent arrangement,” Bruce said. A thoughtful look stole over his face, and Hal had the momentary, shattering conviction that Bruce was going to drag him along on whatever godawful bender Oliver had planned. “If you’re concerned about possible dosage issues on account of administering the antitoxin without a blood test, though, I suppose I could cancel to monitor you for an adverse reaction.”

“Yes.” Hal spit it out so fast he was a little ashamed of himself, so fast Bruce actually let a flicker of surprise cross his face. It wasn’t exactly like Hal hadn’t swallowed his pride a day ago, though--if this kept Bruce out of trouble for a few more hours while Hal got a fucking grip on himself, the monumental amount of shit he was in for from Ollie was an even trade to avoid the fight he was in for with his own subconscious.

“Then go take the antitoxin,” Bruce told him, jerking his head toward the bathroom. He pulled his shirt back on, and Hal almost wanted to ask him not to, but that really would be over the line, wouldn’t it? 

Not that Hal was precisely admiring the admittedly spectacular view, which was at least something to be grateful for. His amygdala might be fucking him over, but his sex drive was showing uncharacteristic restraint and had refrained from inviting itself to the party. Given how tenuous this truce was--Hal couldn’t imagine Bruce putting up with a tenth of this if Hal hadn’t gotten dosed technically doing him a favor--the last thing Hal needed wrecking it was an errant hard-on.

Hal retreated to the bathroom Bruce had indicated, which was just as weirdly pristine and bright as the rest of the place, dropped his pants, and stabbed himself in the thigh with a random fucking cocktail of who the hell even knew, because this was apparently his life now. At least Bruce hadn’t been kidding about the instructions on the package; a chimp could have followed them. There was even a pictogram version, which didn’t make sense until it occurred to Hal that these weren’t just for Bruce. Maybe Bruce scattered them in his wake like beads at Mardi Gras whenever Crane was on the loose, maybe Bruce hadn’t even made them--for all Hal knew, this was standard-issue for Gotham EMTs. Hal barely had his jeans buttoned again before the drugs hit him, and it wasn’t so much a feeling of drunkenness as the feeling of profound, intense relief after being so keyed up for so long knocking out every single support beam he had left in one go.

He stumbled back to the bedroom, pulled off his boots, and curled up on the side not occupied by Bruce’s doubtless booby-trapped luggage, and he was out like a light as soon as his head hit the pillow.

* * *

Hal blinked halfway awake, looked around the room--which was somehow even brighter and more vibrant and less like anything Bruce would get within five miles of in the cheerful early-morning light--and briefly reviewed what he’d done and said last night. He closed his eyes, rolled over, and pulled a pillow over his head to block out the sun. If he went back to sleep, he wouldn’t have to deal with whatever god-tier awkwardness was in store with Bruce for at least another few hours. 

It wasn’t even like Hal couldn’t use the rest. It had to be pushing seven o’clock, based on the angle and strength of the sun, and he couldn’t have crawled into bed any later than eight last night. He’d slept like the dead for going on twelve hours, and he could still go for a catnap, so there really wasn’t any harm in doing himself that solid and also maybe Bruce would have taken the hint and fucked off to a board meeting or whatever it was he was even in town for by the time Hal woke back up. 

Hal could slink back to Coast City and avoid Bruce until the next League meeting, at which point it would be too petty even for him to bring it up as an agenda item. Oliver might, conceivably, call Hal out for being a punk-ass ghosting fuckboy as soon as outstanding business was cleared up if Hal ditched him somewhere, but Bruce? Hal couldn’t picture him admitting he gave a damn in front of the rest of the League. Maybe this didn’t even call for damage-control. Maybe Hal could just walk out the front door and Bruce would pretend it had never happened.

After a few minutes of trying to relax enough to fall back asleep and failing, Hal realized the noise he was hearing, that nagging sound at the edge of consciousness, was running water.

_So that’s what actual decent sound-dampening does._ Hal tried to think back. Had he ever lived in a place where the walls were thick enough to have any doubt that someone was brushing their teeth or snoring loud enough to wake the dead or losing at Halo? Maybe before his dad had died, but then three kids and a stay-at-home mom on a test pilot’s salary didn’t leave a lot of stretch in the budget for high-end digs.

Hal pushed the pillow back and stared at the ceiling. Bruce was in the shower, probably. The coast was clear. Hal could sneak out now, maybe leave a note saying he was fine, and then they’d both just shove it down the memory-hole or something. Hal _should_ sneak out now--it was practically the only way out of this with any dignity. He should sneak out now, but. Hal closed his eyes and tested the edges of the fact that he didn’t want to.

The bed was the most comfortable thing he’d slept on in months, since the last time he and Carol’d had one of their occasional one-night trips down memory lane. It made sense that Hal didn’t want to roll off it, haul himself upright, and fly home. The climate control was a nice change of pace, too; his apartment didn’t have central air, and it had been goddamned muggy out lately. Plus Bruce probably had groceries in the kitchen, just in case the grid went down or the takeout-delivery guys all went on strike or whatever minor disaster that was most likely according to Bruce’s personal defcon system actually happened. Hal’s pantry was very definitely down to cereal and powdered milk, because it turned out grocery shopping while tripping on fear toxin sucked ass.

In the center of all that, comprising the vast majority of it, was the conviction that if he left now, that crushing avalanche of dread and grotesque visualization would hit him again as soon as he closed the door and Bruce was no longer readily accessible.

Which was dumb, because it wasn’t like having Bruce right in front of him had been enough to put a stake through its heart last night, before the antitoxin had kicked in. It was dumb, and Hal knew it was dumb, but if his nervous system had taught him anything in the past couple of days, it was that knowing something was dumb was no guarantee it wouldn’t turn just as real as something that wasn’t dumb.

Hal rubbed his eyes and slid out of bed. This wasn’t something he could hide from, and he had no intention of trying to now that he knew what it was he was doing. He should go, and he should go now, and he should tell Bruce he was leaving, like a goddamned adult, so that if Bruce found him collapsed on the welcome mat like a two-hundred-pound ball of quivering jelly in half an hour when Bruce went out to do whatever it was he did during daylight hours, Hal would at least have some vague excuse to fall back on.

_“I was fine, and then I wasn’t, and it’s probably your interior decorating and not something I’m going to have to seek treatment for on Oa because your city is a waking nightmare.”_

Hal found his way to the master suite, which was bigger than his entire apartment, and studiously ignored the way the bed looked like someone had thrown an orgy in it last night. Hal had managed, at some point, to wrap himself in the blanket; Bruce had left everything half kicked off the bed and half randomly rearranged, like all the checked impulses he tamped down when he pulled on the cowl came spilling out once he was asleep. The bathroom door was cracked--not much, not more than an inch or two, but enough that Hal didn’t pause more than a moment. He wasn’t going to see anything he hadn’t seen a dozen times before, and he was a dab hand at not-looking by now, and maybe it would be nice if he had something to hold onto in case his brain started back up with its bullshit about Bruce being hurt.

Except, of course, there was a big difference between seeing Bruce naked in the Tower’s locker room, which was about as welcoming and cozy as the changing room at a local Y, and seeing Bruce naked in his own place. The high-pile bath mat, the warm steam clinging to everything, the mercilessly unfrosted glass of the shower’s walls, the neat precision with which everything was laid out… This was very much Bruce’s space, and Hal had blundered into it with all the grace of a drunk rhinoceros. 

Hal leaned against the door jamb and swallowed. He’d have known better than this, last week. Known better than to say goodbye, known better than to waltz in without knocking, known better than to stay instead of beating a hasty exit and hoping Bruce hadn’t noticed the momentary intrusion. Known better than to think he could pull this off. Known better than to underestimate just how much time and effort he put into not realizing how beautiful Bruce was.

It was easier, Hal thought, when everyone else was around. He spent a lot of time and effort not-realizing how hot half the League was. When it was a League thing, Bruce essentially blended in with the rest of the people Hal was resolutely not hitting on or ogling while he was wearing the uniform, a difference of scale and not of kind when it came to Hal needing to mind his manners. This was very much not a League thing, and Bruce was very much not half-hidden behind his cape.

“Did you need something?” Bruce asked, not turning around. He stretched his head to the side and let the spray of water hit his chest, and Hal dug his nails into his palms at the clean line of Bruce’s neck running into those broad shoulders.

“I thought I did,” Hal said. This was Bruce giving him a few seconds to get himself in hand, wasn’t it? To look somewhere else, to dig into that vaunted willpower of his, to think about that time he’d cannonballed into a swimming pool that had turned out to be like fifty fucking degrees, to get the blush screaming across his face under control. This was the window for plausible deniability, where Hal could pretend he hadn’t and Bruce could pretend he didn’t notice. All of which required Hal to tear his eyes off Bruce, which Hal belatedly understood was not going to happen.

Bruce was whole and healthy, and Bruce was gorgeous, and after the last few days Hal didn’t have enough left to make himself pretend everything was fine. Bruce wasn’t laboring under the same handicap, and he didn’t even glance at Hal as he turned off the water, slid the door open, and reached for a towel.

Hal stopped him, rested a light hand on Bruce’s hip, and leaned into him. It was careful, gentle, nothing like how he’d be handling himself if the situation was normal. Nothing like how he’d imagined himself handling things when his and Bruce’s verbal sparring sessions had taken on that edge that made him feel like there was more to it than a simple battle of wills or a personality clash.

The situation wasn’t normal; if Hal had any doubts about that, the relief flooding through him at the feel of Bruce’s flesh--warm, solid, real--through his suddenly-damp clothes would have banished them. When Bruce didn’t push him away or protest, Hal wrapped his arms around Bruce’s waist and clung to him. All of this was Hal’s fault, except that none of it had really happened, and this was probably how dogs felt the first time somebody faked them out by pretending to throw a ball.

Bruce patted Hal’s back. “Talk to me, Hal.”

“I don’t think you understand how incredibly bad I am at that,” Hal murmured, letting his cheek rest against Bruce’s shoulder.

Bruce looped one arm across Hal’s back, the other snaking up and across Hal’s shoulder blades, and Hal felt a band of tension he’d been carrying around his heart for the past three days loosen. He was probably never going to live this down, but right now he definitely didn’t care.

“Do you remember when Oliver was arguing with Barry about whether or not it was healthy to go entire months without hearing from a sibling, and he asked you to confirm it, and instead of answering you made a series of noncommittal noises and then faked a call from your boss to extricate yourself from the conversation?” Bruce asked.

Hal closed his eyes and focused on the sound of Bruce’s voice vibrating through his fingers, the palms of his hands, his arms. Of course he remembered the conversation; half of it was seared into his brain. Barry was an only child, and so Barry hadn’t understood how brothers and sisters could be the greatest thing in the world and also capable of shoving a knife right in the worst spot they could find. It had felt like some unretractable confession of deep dysfunction to say as much, the sort of thing that would make Barry look at him differently forever, and so Hal had bailed instead of talking. It was just desperately unfair that Bruce remembered that conversation, too.

“Okay, so you might have some grasp of how incredibly bad,” Hal said. It helped, not having to see Bruce’s face, not having to look into blue eyes that gave away absolutely nothing about what was going on behind them.

“Make an attempt,” Bruce told him. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“I’m just…” Hal fumbled for the right words. It wasn’t that things didn’t scare him. He’d be an idiot, if he hadn’t been scared of some of the shit he’d faced down. It was that he powered through it, didn’t let it stop him, and then once it turned out to be a survivable, winnable experience, his brain got the message and stopped trying to psych him out over it. “I’m not used to it being like this. You _know_ me. I’m never out of control like that. Like this. This isn’t the sort of thing that knocks me down so hard I can’t get back up afterwards.”

Bruce snorted, and Hal steeled himself for a shitty comment. It wasn’t like Bruce hadn’t earned the right to one or two, and so far he’d been shockingly tolerant of Hal’s behavior.

“You’re a healthy person who’s caught a cold for the first time,” Bruce said. It was probably Hal’s imagination, but he sounded almost gentle, almost affectionate. “It will pass, Hal. It’s miserable, and you may need further treatment, but trust me--it will pass. That’s what you need to focus on right now.”

It was easier to focus on Bruce than on some nebulous, if reassuring, promise. Of course, if Hal lifted his head and actually looked at Bruce, there would be that lantern-shaped bruise stamped on his face, so there was the small chance that maybe Hal owed him a little more than the excuse of Hal being off his game.

“I’m also not used to fucking up like this,” Hal said softly. 

Not that he expected Bruce to understand that one. Bruce had everything mapped out, all his bases covered, and contingency plans for his contingency plans. When he fucked up--if he survived fucking up--it wasn’t because he hadn’t tried his hardest. Something unknowable and unaccountable had shoved a monkey wrench into the gears, and that was hardly on Bruce. The ring let Hal play to his strengths; he could drag everything out into the light, get a good look at it, and then make the best play from there. He just hadn’t figured on Gotham being all dark, no stars. He hadn’t figured on something that could douse the light and leave him floundering around blind.

“I’m especially not used to fucking up like this and having it come back on someone else.”

“Mmm. Who else, exactly, has this come back on?” Bruce asked. 

He sounded like Hal had just introduced some novel idea or new piece of evidence, and Hal debated stepping back and trying to gauge Bruce’s expression. He didn’t really want to, though. For all that it was weird, grafting himself onto Bruce like this while Bruce was naked and wet from the shower and Hal was still wearing yesterday’s clothes and might conceivably have been making a move if he was capable of getting an erection after the past three days, this was probably the most comfortable he’d been since he’d bolted for Coast City the morning after. And, of course, Bruce’s expression wasn’t--was never--going to give away anything more than he wanted it to.

“Ah, well, there would be you, for starters,” Hal said slowly. “I can’t imagine this was how you were planning to spend the last twelve hours. Not to mention that black eye probably got some questions asked at the country club.”

“Cosmetics exist,” Bruce reminded him. “Though with my reputation, even if I didn’t cover it up, most people would make one of a few obvious assumptions and move on. And, to be perfectly frank, I suspect Oliver’s plans for the night would have resulted in significantly more, and longer-lasting, inconvenience, trauma, and-or felony practicing without a license charges. Nothing you’ve done has, as you said, come back on me.”

“You had to let Poison Ivy go to take care of me.”

“She went home to vent to her girlfriend about rogue psychiatrists and how unreliable they are as partners, which started a loud argument about whether or not her girlfriend counts as a rogue psychiatrist since she’s a rogue and a psychiatrist, which led to one of the neighbors calling in a tip on their location. So that part of the evening led to no further criminal activity and three arrests.”

“Three?” Hal couldn’t help asking it, even though he knew he’d regret it.

“Isley, Quinn, and the neighbor. He had a few bench warrants out for unpaid fines, tickets, that sort of thing.”

Hal tried to imagine how that’d go in Coast City. “They didn’t, uh, instruct him to appear the next day or advise him that he needed to surrender?”

“And risk inculcating a feeling of trust and cooperation between the citizenry and the police theoretically there to protect them?” Bruce asked.

“Your city is completely out of its fucking mind,” Hal said. “You know that, right?”

“It’s been mentioned a few times in passing, yes. Fortunately, the Dent Foundation received a convenient donation to provide legal aid and debt relief for the good samaritan, so he’s out of jail and working on clearing his record.” Bruce shifted his grip, and Hal reflexively tightened his. Bruce sighed, and the hand that was on Hal’s shoulder lifted, then settled on the back of Hal’s head. “Hal.”

“I’m sorry.” And he was, was the thing. Just not sorry enough to let go. Not sorry enough to let Bruce get back to his life. “Christ. You have no idea what sort of awful shit’s been playing on repeat in my head the past few days. It’s just still really,” Hal swallowed, “ _surreal_ to--”

Bruce’s hand stroked through his hair, and Hal stopped talking. Bruce did know, didn’t he? He’d told Bruce, before he’d taken off. Bruce had sat there and assured him that every goddamn thing he’d thought he’d seen while he’d been having his mother of all bad trips hadn’t been real.

“Hal, you made a mistake. That’s all. You didn’t hurt anyone, and no one got hurt because of you. The only one suffering is, in fact, you, and hopefully Mid-Night can take care of that later today. Stop doing the poison’s work for it,” Bruce said quietly.

“You’re being suspiciously kind about all this,” Hal told him.

“If I’d done the sensible thing and not taken you with me, none of this would have happened.”

Hal exhaled slowly. “And there it is.”

Bruce’s hand didn’t stop stroking his hair, though, and it was hard for Hal to put much heat into it. Bruce certainly wasn’t wrong.

“You didn’t listen, you weren’t taking it as seriously as you should have, and you didn’t understand the risks we were facing. The safe play would have been not to involve you. I wanted you with me more than I wanted you to be safe, and now you’re paying for it.”

“Did you just admit you wanted me in the field with you?” Hal asked.

“Yes, but if you tell anyone I’ll insist you hallucinated it while high on fear toxin,” Bruce said, and his deadpan was perfect enough that Hal finally did let go, take a step back, and look for that shady fucking smirk Bruce got when he was being too damn clever for anybody’s good.

It was there, of course, right there at the corner of his mouth, but Bruce was also still naked, and Hal’s limbic system was finally beginning to remember exactly what it meant to half-climb a guy who looked like Bruce and talked like Bruce and wasn’t wearing any clothes. Hal flushed and looked away, biting his lip. This was the part where he spit out some smart reply, blotted his clothes dry with a towel, and swept out of the penthouse. This was the part where he could still back away from the ledge he’d found himself on, find some solid ground, get things back to normal.

“It’s not your job to keep me safe,” Hal said instead, because Bruce was hardly diving for the towel, and _normal_ would probably require him to keep ignoring that fact.

“Well, it has to be someone’s job,” Bruce pointed out. “And you’re certainly not doing it.”

Hal took a deep breath. It was so easy for Bruce, wasn’t it? Just line them up and knock them down. If Hal wanted to put his walls back up, slip on his Green Lantern mask and play untouchable superhero, come out swinging and close the gates behind him, that was fine, but Bruce was damn sure going to match him move for move. _“A minute ago, you weren’t lying to me.”_

How many chances had Bruce given him, to not fuck up? And Hal had blown right past every single one of them without even blinking. Well, what was one more?

Hal leaned forward again, shoved his lips against Bruce’s, and pressed him back against the shower door. Not hard--the last thing he needed right now was Bruce snapping into self-defense mode and tearing his face off--but enough to let Bruce know he meant it, that he wasn’t just doing this to win an argument, which was probably why Bruce was kissing him back, running his hands over Hal’s waist, and pulling him closer.

Bruce was going easier than Hal figured he usually did, keeping his touch light--nothing Hal couldn’t just slip right out of if he changed his mind or came to his senses. It wasn’t that Bruce was unsure of himself, which was something Hal couldn’t physically picture Bruce being, so much as Bruce was keeping himself in check. It might not have been something Hal would’ve noticed, even, if he wasn’t doing the same thing, resisting the impulse to grab Bruce’s ass, squeeze, rut against him, lean into him like this was all Hal wanted in the world. 

Hal came on strong, when he was sure everyone involved was on the same page; he’d never seen any point to screwing around when it came to screwing. But this wasn’t a thing Hal had imagined being on the menu when he’d shown up out of the blue, and it wasn’t like they’d had the sort of conversations that Hal could sift back through, looking for information about what Bruce might want out of him here, like this.

After a few minutes of kissing that slowly grew hungrier, more forceful, and more confident, Hal broke off and mouthed at Bruce’s throat.

“I feel like I’m wearing too many clothes, for where this is going,” Hal said, kissing his way down to Bruce’s collarbone. “That about right, or do I need to do a little recalibration?”

Bruce chuckled. “Occasionally your instincts are--”

He broke off, sucking in a breath when Hal’s teeth scraped over his nipple, and the spasm of Bruce’s fingers against Hal’s back was enough to get his heart beating harder all by itself.

“Sorry,” Hal said innocently, lifting his head. “You were in the middle of negging me, I think?”

Bruce shifted back, away from him, and Hal almost regretted saying something. Bruce was smiling though, that rueful, wry thing Hal didn’t see enough of.

“I was going to say ‘shockingly accurate,’ but then I remembered your ego was already big enough to fill a warehouse,” Bruce said. He reached up and ran his fingers through Hal’s hair. “Where do you want this to go, Hal?”

“If I say Pound-Town--”

“Please at least find some other way of phrasing it.” Bruce wrinkled his nose, and Hal laughed. Every time he thought that maybe this was some weird dream, or that he was still hallucinating, Bruce was there to bring him back down to earth.

“I mean, is that off the table? I gotta say, this isn’t something I ever thought you’d, um.” _Tolerate_ was definitely not the word he wanted, and not the word for what Bruce was doing when he bent his head, nudged Hal’s mouth open again, and kissed him thoroughly.

“Let’s start with you wearing too many clothes, and go from there,” Bruce said, when he let Hal up for air. 

Hal practically tore his tshirt off, then dropped his hands to his jeans. He glanced up to find Bruce watching him appreciatively, and he paused.

“So, just out of curiosity,” he said, slowly unbuttoning his fly. “Where do _you_ want this to go?”

He made a show of unzipping his jeans, sliding them down a few inches, letting Bruce get a good look at him. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d spent a lot of time and energy not-looking, up there on the Watchtower. He certainly wasn’t the only one making up for lost time, here and now and with full expectations that he’d be looking his fill.

“Today, or within the next six months?” Bruce asked, and Hal blinked at him like he’d just started speaking Martian. 

There was the casualness with which he’d said it, just thrown it out there like it was a rational, obvious thing to say, and then there was what he’d actually said. Hal tested a few replies, shuffling rapidly through ‘That’s a pretty big assumption there, pal.’ and ‘Now whose ego could fill a warehouse?’ and ‘Ha ha, very funny.’ before it occurred to him that this wasn’t Bruce being a dick. This was, conceivably, Bruce letting him know that this didn’t have to be a hit-and-run before they did much more than make out.

“I’m thinking today, and then let’s maybe have a clothes-on talk about the next six months sometime after Oliver stops giving me grief about getting laid low by a master gardener.”

Bruce frowned. “So, never.”

“That’s not--” Hal stopped. “His attention span isn’t that long. Plus he has no room whatsoever to talk.”

“If you say so,” Bruce said, spreading his hands, and Hal rubbed his eyes. It was going on his tombstone. Even if Oliver kicked off first, even if Hal got buried at sea or in space or made Kilowog promise to fire his corpse into the fucking sun, Oliver would see to it that Hal had a tombstone and that ‘got his ass kicked by a plant’ would be carved in it. Possibly, Hal should have been slightly more generous about the time Oliver had called Hal for an ID on an alien that had turned out to be a Jersey Shore resident in a costume. Certainly, the last thing Hal wanted to be thinking about right now was Oliver.

“Okay, look,” Hal said, grimacing. “I don’t know about you, but it’s been a real motherfucker of a week for me. I just want to come until I can’t feel my body, preferably without making too many dumb faces in the process, and then go back to sleep, hopefully without drooling all over you. The configuration of events that get me there is highly negotiable, at this point.”

“A compelling argument.”

But Bruce was smiling, and tilting his head, and raising his eyebrows, and shooting a pointed look at Hal’s hands, which had migrated back to his waistband of their own accord, and Hal smirked.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he promised.

They made it back to Bruce’s trashed bed without really letting go of each other, and Hal could feel the last of that curdled, adrenaline-spiked fear evaporating. Bruce’s hands were still light on his skin, still gentle, but Bruce’s mouth and Bruce’s eyes and Bruce’s cock left no space to imagine that Bruce didn’t want him just as much as he wanted Bruce. 

They’d been dancing around this for ages, hadn’t they? Every time Bruce had told him to move and Hal had come back with _make me_ , every time Bruce had gone on ahead and told Hal to keep up, every time they’d pushed each other to be better, it had been as much an invitation as a dare. It was interesting, all the things Hal had been deliberately not-realizing when it came to Bruce.

Bruce pulled Hal down with him, onto the mattress, and Hal kissed his way down Bruce’s chest to his belly, then to his hip, and then, when Bruce didn’t make any move to stop him or slow him down, to his cock. It was something Hal had never really let himself think about--what it would be like to suck Bruce until he came--and he’d certainly never let himself think about what it would be like for Bruce to interrupt him before he finished, to roll them over so Bruce could rut lazily against him while he kissed Hal and jerked him off. Bruce was too focused, never taking his eyes off the prize, for Hal to have thought this was how it would go once they were in bed.

Bruce drew it out, in no more of a hurry to get off than he was to get Hal off, content to put them both through their paces for a while. Hal couldn’t mind, not when it gave him ample opportunity to map Bruce’s skin with his hands, his tongue, his eyes, when it gave him chance after chance to handle that beautiful cock, get his fingers in that thick black hair. Bruce seemed almost as interested in the noises he could wring out of Hal, in how Hal’s spine bowed when Bruce touched him just right, in how Hal’s eyes sharpened when Bruce teased him, as he was in what Hal was doing for him.

Bruce had Hal’s cock in his mouth, had Hal groaning and digging his fingers into the bunched sheets, when the spell finally slipped. Hal looked down at him, eyes skimming the sweat-slick, tan skin of his own belly to find Bruce’s lips wrapped around his cock, Bruce’s eyes looking back at him, and it was like seeing that bruise on his face again for the first time.

He’d hit Bruce, hard enough to leave a mark that was probably still getting worse. He’d never meant to, never wanted to--even when he’d been angry at Bruce, pissed about one thing or furious about another, he’d never thought about taking a swing at Bruce. He’d never wanted to hurt Bruce.

And then Bruce pulled off of Hal’s softening cock, gathered Hal into an embrace, and firmly tucked Hal’s face against the other side of his own, blocking the bruise from sight.

“It wasn’t intentional, Hal,” Bruce said quietly, one hand curled in Hal’s hair and the other tracing light trails up and down his spine. “You wouldn’t have, not on purpose.”

“You don’t…” It was selfish, wasn’t it--taking something he didn’t deserve--to bury his face against Bruce’s neck? This whole morning wasn’t something Bruce should have been down for. “You can’t know that.”

The way they argued, the way they hardly ever agreed on anything, the things Hal had said to him and the things Bruce had said right back--it was ludicrous, Bruce being so damned sure of Hal’s feelings.

“You’ve accused me of being a mind-reader on three separate occasions,” Bruce reminded him, kissing Hal’s shoulder. “One of which was completely sincere.” He paused to suck a small, sweetly painful bruise of his own into Hal’s skin. “How long have we been working together?”

Hal grunted instead of answering, his hands tightening on Bruce’s hips when Bruce’s teeth brushed over that spot.

“In all that time, I’ve had to ask you for something less than a dozen times,” Bruce continued, his voice measured and reasonable, like they weren’t naked and wrapped around each other and splayed out on Bruce’s bed. “Whatever I need from you--a shield, a bridge, structural reinforcement, civilian evacuation--it’s already there.”

Hal swallowed. Bruce didn’t ask him for things because Bruce… Hal wound his arms around Bruce’s waist and hung on.

“I know you,” Bruce sighed, kissing him again. “And you know me. You know I’m not in the habit of lying to people just to reassure them.”

Which no, Bruce wasn’t. Bruce was, in fact, kind of an asshole about not reassuring people if he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t lying to them in the process. Hal relaxed against Bruce and was rewarded with a gentle squeeze.

“You’ve spent the last three days terrorizing yourself over the possibility of having accidentally hurt me, Hal,” Bruce reminded him. “I can, in fact, know for certain that you didn’t do this on purpose.”

Hal closed his eyes and tried not to smile. How was Bruce being a son of a bitch somehow an argument in favor of this all being fine? How was this his fucking life? “Yeah. About that whole mind-reader thing.”

“Mmm.”

“I was actually a hundred-percent serious about two of those accusations.”

Bruce chuckled and cradled Hal against his side for a few seconds before he said, “You weren’t, though.”

“Oh, I totally was.”

Bruce’s hand in his hair was unexpectedly tender, and Hal couldn’t help clinging to him. Bruce was fine. Well, maybe not _fine_ , but as good as he ever was. As good as any of them ever were. This wasn’t something Hal had to cut himself to the bone over. Then Bruce was kissing him again, nudging Hal’s mouth open and kissing him like he was never going to stop, and Hal kissed him back. Bruce pressed against him, and Hal’s cock took a renewed interest in proceedings.

“You know what I’m thinking now?” Hal asked, throwing his thigh over Bruce’s hip.

“I do, but that’s not much in the way of conclusive evidence,” Bruce laughed, kissing him again.

Hal pulled back and frowned. “Really? Not much? You weren’t complaining about it a few minutes ago.”

“Not what I meant, and you know it.” Bruce laughed harder, and Hal soaked it up, let it replace so much of the past three days in his brain. Bruce laughing, genuinely laughing--it wasn’t a thing he’d heard often.

“How would I know it?” Hal asked, smirking. “Unlike some people, I’m not a mind-reader.”

Bruce scoffed, shook his head, and then wrapped his hand around Hal’s cock, and suddenly there wasn’t room for anything in Hal’s thoughts except that. They’d figure this out. They’d manage. Probably not _well_ \--their track record spoke for itself--but they would manage. And in the meantime, Hal intended to let Bruce blot out as much of the last few days as he cared to, however he wanted to, so long as he stayed right here in Hal’s arms.


End file.
